Are Trump and Clinton Now Unstoppable?

Donald Trump campaigns in Las Vegas in advance of the Nevada Republican primary.

Photograph By Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call / Getty

The Presidential primary season is moving into top gear. Counting Tuesday's victory for Donald Trump in the Nevada caucus, which my colleague Amy Davidson wrote about, twenty-four elections will take place in eight days. (It's twenty-five if you count the “Democrats abroad” contest, which opens on March 1st and lasts for a week.) Right now, Trump and Hillary Clinton are the firm favorites to be the two nominees. By next Tuesday night, the two of them could appear virtually unstoppable.

Such an impression wouldn’t necessarily be accurate. With most of the big primaries yet to be held, it would be perfectly possible for either or both of the front-runners to be defeated. But, for the other candidates, the delegate math would start to look very forbidding, and something very dramatic would be required for them to turn things around.

On Saturday, the South Carolina Democratic primary will take place, and a Clinton win looks nearly certain. Three days later, on Super Tuesday, elections will be held in twelve states, most of them in the South. In some of the states that will vote that day, such as Alaska and Arkansas, not much polling has been done. But in most of the bigger states, where recent surveys have been carried out, Trump and Clinton appear to be running well ahead of their opponents.

The margins predicted by some of the polls are huge. On Monday, for example, a survey from Georgia showed Clinton leading Bernie Sanders by fifty-two percentage points, seventy-two to twenty. On the G.O.P. side, a poll from Massachusetts, which also votes next Tuesday, showed Trump leading Rubio by thirty-four percentage points, fifty to sixteen.

A few weeks ago, in Iowa, we relearned the lesson that state polls aren’t always reliable. And, of course, with a week to go until Super Tuesday, something could still happen to change the dynamics underlying the races. On the Republican side, for example, Marco Rubio could capitalize on his second-place finish in South Carolina, exploiting Cruz’s stumbles and Jeb Bush’s departure from the race to mount a serious challenge to Trump. Or something dramatic could happen in the televised debate on Thursday. As we saw in Iowa and New Hampshire, big swings can take place in the last few days before a primary.

Right now, though, the two front-runners don’t just have favorable survey numbers; they have structural factors working for them. Trump, following his twenty-point triumph in Nevada, clearly has momentum on his side, and he is benefitting greatly from the fact that the vote among those who don’t support him is divided, and is likely to remain that way for a while. Clinton, after struggling in Iowa and New Hampshire, is now competing with Sanders in states where there are a lot of African-American voters—a voting group that, in Nevada, went in her favor by nearly four-to-one.

On the Republican side, come next Tuesday, Trump might well run the table in the northern half of the country, where four states will hold G.O.P. contests. In addition to the lopsided poll from Massachusetts, a new survey from neighboring Vermont shows him with a fifteen-point lead over Rubio. Elsewhere, the polling data is older. A survey taken in Alaska last month showed Trump ahead, and that was before he received the endorsement of Sarah Palin, the state’s former governor. In Minnesota, two surveys were carried out in January. In one of them, Trump had a seventeen-point lead; in the other, he was just behind Rubio and Cruz.

Although these races are important, most of the attention will be focussed on the South, where seven states will vote on the Republican candidate. Having easily carried South Carolina, where he demonstrated an ability to take white evangelical voters from Cruz, Trump seems well placed to win most of these contests and rack up a lot of delegates. (Until the winner-take-all contests start, on March 15th, the Republican delegates will all be allocated in proportion to the number of votes cast.) Texas, Cruz’s home state, is the biggest prize up for grabs on Super Tuesday, with a hundred and fifty-five delegates at stake. Then comes Georgia, with seventy-eight delegates; Tennessee, with fifty-eight; Alabama, with fifty; Virginia, with forty-nine; Oklahoma, with forty-three; and Arkansas, with forty. In five of these seven states, Trump has a clear lead in the latest polls. The exceptions are Arkansas, where there hasn’t been any polling in a while, and Texas, where Cruz is in front, with Trump running second.

In Georgia, a new survey carried out by Landmark/Rosetta Stone shows Trump leading Rubio by nine points. In Tennessee, no public polls have been carried out since December, when Trump appeared to be ahead. In Alabama, where Trump has held huge rallies, a survey carried out at the start of this month showed him leading Ted Cruz by sixteen per cent. In Oklahoma, a poll carried out two weeks ago put him ahead of Cruz by five points.

Numbers like that leave Texas as a must-win state for Cruz. In the most recent poll, which the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune published last week, Cruz was ahead of Trump by eight per cent. The lead was smaller than ones Cruz enjoyed very early in the race, and it didn’t reflect any possible fallout from his setback in South Carolina. Many experts on Texas politics believe that Cruz will hold on to win, but they also think that Trump could inflict some serious wounds on him with a strong showing. “Donald Trump is not going to win in Texas: that isn’t going to happen,” Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, told the Houston Chronicle. “But he could do well in Texas, and that would be very bad for Ted Cruz.”

Indeed, for Trump, victories in other states, combined with a good showing in Texas behind Cruz, could be the ideal result. Cruz winning Texas wouldn’t pose a real threat to the front-runner, and it would probably keep the Senator in the race, insuring further vote-splitting among the challengers.

In the Democratic race, Clinton appears to have an even bigger lock on the South than Trump does. I already mentioned the new poll from Georgia, showing her more than fifty points ahead of Sanders. In other Southern states, too, she appears to have commanding leads. According to a multi-state survey carried out last week by Public Policy Polling, she is ahead by twenty-eight points in Alabama, twenty-six points in Tennessee, twenty-five points in Arkansas, and twenty-two points in Virginia. “Clinton is benefiting in these states from overwhelming African American support,” P.P.P.’s Tom Jensen said in a statement. “She leads by anywhere from 40-62 points among black voters in the nine of these states that have more black voters than the national average.”

The only competitive Southern states appear to be Oklahoma, where Sanders came within two points of Clinton in the P.P.P. survey, and Texas, where the most recent poll, from the University of Texas/Texas Tribune, shows Sanders narrowing what had been a very wide Clinton lead, to ten points. Perhaps reflecting this development, the Clinton campaign has been deploying more staff to Texas. However, a co-director of the new poll, Jim Henson, who heads the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, still believes Clinton is safe. ”This race is narrowing, but not narrowing in a way for the lines to actually cross,” Henson told the Texas Tribune. “This will be a double-digit race, but I don’t think it’s going to be a twenty-point race.”

Evidently steeling itself for some big losses in the South, the Sanders campaign is making a big push in Oklahoma, which the candidate will visit on Wednesday. It is also concentrating on Northern states where Democrats will vote next Tuesday: Colorado and Minnesota, both of which are caucus states, and Massachusetts and Vermont.

Sanders looks like a shoo-in in his home state. According to one poll carried out last week, he is set to get 83.1 per cent of the vote. Across the state border, in Massachusetts, the race looks much closer: a survey that Emerson College, in Boston, carried out over the weekend showed Sanders and Clinton dead even. The two caucus contests are also tough to predict. Until not long ago, Clinton appeared to be well ahead in both states, but some recent polling, which isn’t necessarily reliable, suggests that in Colorado, at least, Sanders is closing the gap.

Between them, these four Northern states have more than three hundred delegates. But the eight Southern states, including South Carolina, boast more than seven hundred and fifty delegates. If Clinton racks up big victories in most of them, she could open up a substantial lead in the delegate count even if Sanders does well in the North.

As I said above, that wouldn’t necessarily be decisive. To win the nomination, a candidate needs to accumulate two thousand three hundred and eighty-three delegates. But it would put the onus on Sanders to rebound strongly in some of the large primaries that take place in the ensuing two weeks. Michigan votes on March 8th. Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio all vote on March 15th. The discouraging news for Sanders is that, as of today, he appears to be well behind in all of those states, too.

This post was updated to include the result of the G.O.P. caucus in Nevada.